Astronomers Discover Heaviest Neutron Star

A team of American and Dutch scientists has made a weighty discovery. Some 3,000 light years from earth, astronomers have discovered the heaviest neutron star on record. In the Oct. 28 of the journal, Nature, researchers said the star, J-1614-2330, is nearly two times the size of the sun and 20 percent larger than the now second mightiest star.

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A team of American and Dutch scientists has made a weighty discovery. Some 3,000 light years from earth, astronomers have discovered the heaviest neutron star on record. In the Oct. 28 of scientific journal, Nature,

"The typical size of a neutron star is something like 10km in radius," Dr. Paul Demorest of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va. said in in a BBC report. "It's approximately the size of a city, which for an astronomical object is interesting because people can conceive of it pretty easily; and yet in that space it has the mass in this case about two times our Sun. So the size is easy to understand but the density is much more extreme than anything we know here on earth."

Besides being incredibly compact, the star spins super fast. It rotates around a companion white dwarf star, turning at 317 revolutions per second while emitting radio pulses, making it a "pulsar." The proximity of the white dwarf slows the pulses down, similar to ticks on a clock, in a phenomenon called the "Shapiro Delay." The pulses, combined with the delay and period of its orbit allowed scientists to measure its mass.

Neutron stars are made up of the remnants of regular stars after they explode. This discovery has helped scientist learn more about the type of matter that comprises these types of bodies. According to the BBC report, "it puts constraints on the type of exotic material that can form a neutron star." This finding means it's likely that the insides of huge stars like this one are made up of protons and neutrons rather than foreign material.

Leslie Horn joined the PCMag team as a news reporter in the fall of 2010. She covers a wide range of topics from digital media to the latest Apple rumor. After graduating with a degree in Magazine Journalism from the University of Missouri, she wrote for Out & About, a travel guide in coastal Maine. One of her favorite reporting experiences was covering the 2008 Olympics from Beijing. She travels every chance she gets, and recently spent time backpacking along the coast of Brazil. Though she...
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